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So, Monday morning, I worked from midnight-10am for the company I work for. I got home around 11:45 and napped until 4 or so. I woke up and watched TV for a while, then Ben came home. About 30 minutes later, he had come up with a great plan. We were going camping with our neighbor Mike. To take pictures. Where, he didn’t quite know, but once Mike got off work.

Long story very short, we left around midnight (after another nap on my part) and got to Rifle Falls State park around 5:30 am. We took about a 3 hour nap (in our easy-to-put-up tent — two poles and a third for the rain hood to keep it open), and it was off to shoot the falls. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.

As a member of the knittyboard, and a newly re-born sockknitter, I decided to join the swap. Only as “regular coffee” which means I’m only obligated to a single pair of socks to my swap partner. I got matched with knitomania, and we’ve been chatting back and forth for a while.

Hey, SWA gals — especially MJ — if you remember the ‘denim’ superwash I made a while ago that I said I’d keep for myself, well… I did, and I’m now knitting the sock swap socks with it. I wound it into a center-pull ball with both ends in the center, and it’s HUUUUGE. I think I’ll be able to get at least 2, maybe 3 pairs of socks from this thing.

I was going to do the boyfriend socks, but the yarn I have is more a sport weight than a ‘sock weight’, and 72 stitches would make a hat, not a sock. My plans for toe socks haven’t gone by the wayside, but since I’ve got this on the needles, I figure I should finish this before I start on that hair-brained idea (and this way I can do more thinking and planning and bugging everyone for “how big are your toes?”, and handing out i-cord bits for various people to try on).

I don’t know whether I’ll be able to drag myself out of bed for WWKIP day and drag myself downtown in time to relax before going to work… so if I’m not there, I’ll be spinning. I just wet-finished ~450 yds of the shetland, and am spinning even thinner singles. I’m still looking for ‘sock-weight’ 2-ply off of the Joy. She can do it, I’m sure.

I’ve been spinning my shetland fleeces bulky, and last night I got a great idea. Why not try to spin it thinner? It likes being spun thin, and I’ve been fighting with it a little to spin it bulky (2 worsted-ish sized singles). So, 2 bobbins later, I’ve got 163 (or so) yards of a near fingering-weight shetland yarn. I can’t find my WPI tool — so I may be heading to the Llama Store before work. Yarn preparation? None. It’s been washed and I pull it out of the lingerie bag in clumps. I like to spin from ‘clumps’ of fiber in the first place — I’ve been known to spin from the big chunk of prepared top, without pre-drafting, so this is no big deal. 🙂

I figured since this is a new blog, I’d start something new. I subscribe to audible.com, and get 2 books a month on my plan. I listen as I drive to and from work, and figured that I should keep a record of what I liked and didn’t like — and maybe someone else will be spared the horror of a bad book, or be turned onto a book that they otherwise wouldn’t have read. I also subscribe to Zooba, and will review paper books occasionally.

This was a greatly interesting book. After listening to the Odd Thomas books, I’m more or less used to the detailed writing of Koontz. If you’re not used to it, it can be somewhat infuriating as Koontz describes something in great detail while you’re expecting something, anything, to happen. He’s somewhat more wordy than Stephen King, but it’s a style that you get used to after a while.

The story, very broadly, is about a god who is Becoming. Unfortunately, this god is not a benevolent, loving deity, but a vicious, vindictive god.

It’s also a story about a cop and his partner. Harry Lyon is the calm and collected half to his partner Connie Gulliver’s gung-ho ‘ride the wave’ half. They work together well, and end up in a crazy situation while eating lunch, which leads to the insanity and the supernatural weirdness that follows.

If that wasn’t enough, it’s also the story of a homeless woman and her son, and a former ad executive turned wino. And my favorite character, the dog, Woofer.

The story is told in turns, in third person. First, you see through Harry’s eyes, then Connie’s. The god Becoming, the homeless wino, the homeless woman and her son, and then the dog. The constant change of voice isn’t distracting, as it could have been. Each piece of the story fits together with the next piece rather well, even when you don’t think it should.

The characters are well-developed, and at the end of the 12 hours and 9 minutes, the conclusion of the book doesn’t leave you wondering who X person was or why X person did what they did. All in all, the story is compelling, if a bit gross in parts (but it’s a horror book, and to be somewhat expected), but not nightmare-causing.

The format:

The only complaint I have with this audiobook is a minor one — the narrator’s S’s whistle somewhat, which was a little distracting at the beginning of the book, but became more tolerable as the time wore on. Jay O. Sanders’s performance was otherwise well-acted. You could tell Connie from Harry from the dog by the way Sanders spoke. Each character had its own cadence, its own tone. Even if you leave the book and come back, you can figure out rather quickly just which character is speaking.